What is Website Statistics ?

Website statistics are essential while marketing a website since advertisers and people who use that website need to know how well it is doing or how many hits that site is generating. In short, they need to know whether they are generating revenues or not. What is desired is an effective program to conclude how well a particular website is doing.

Learning the way to check website statistics can assist you to develop your web site for visitors, measure if your promotional strategies are working, and find new possibilities to boost your online business.

Website Statistics

How can you measure your website statistics?

There are two common ways to measure this essential information.

One is with software that analyzes the server log files. Every time someone visits your site the server stores precise information about the visitor and what they did on your website. With software like Webalyzer or AWStats of website statistics that information is kept in a form which is easily understandable. Several website hosts give this software installed in advance on their servers and available to clients through a cPanel or Plesk administrative area.

The other method to maintain track of your website statistics is with a JavaScript added on pages that sends info to other server every time a visitor loads a page, like Google Analytics, StatCounter, WebTrends, Yahoo! Web Analytics or Crazy Egg. Through both of these services to check website statistics you can sign up and then they send a small snippet of code to copy paste into your WebPages. Measuring the onsite behavior of your visitors and spiders is essential, not only in gauging the effectiveness of your optimization efforts, but in measuring the effectiveness of your website design in converting those visitors to buyers.

You may want to integrate both techniques to get a best overall picture of who is visiting your website and what they’re doing.

What do the terms mean in website statistics?

Hits:

Each request for a file from a server is calculated as a hit in website statistics. This is an often get the wrong idea about the term. It actually doesn’t mean you’ve had 5,000 people visit your site if you have had 5,000 hits. If your page has one html file and five images on it, then each time a visitor loads the page it would count as six hits.

Page Views:

How many times a “page” as defined in log analysis has been loaded. This is more precise than hits because it will only add the.html or.php files rather of every image on a page.

Unique Visitors:

A unique visitor is the most essential information in website statistics than hits or page views. It tracks number of different computers have visited your website.

Number of Visits:

In website statistics, number of visits means how many unique sessions was logged in. If a person visits your site today and then again in a week, that would be counted as two visits.

Spiders Visited:

Various tracking/analysis softwares are able to show you which “spiders” from search engines visited your site. This is an easy way to see if your site is being indexed by various search engines. Manage and track visits by robots, spiders and crawlers to your website. Identify which spiders visited, when they visited, and what pages they indexed.

Top Pages:

Top Pages are the most popular of the website. Look for the top pages section of your website statistics to see what visitors are most interested in.

Connect to Site From or Search Phrases Used:

Depending upon different softwares or analyzer you are using but most will include a section allowing you to see how visitors found you.  It will show if they’ve been subsequent to a link from other website, a search engine, or typed in your URL directly.

HTTP Status Codes:

Your analyzer may also show you if your visitors got 404 or other errors. Watch this section to see if you’ve got a broken link or other problem somewhere on your website that you need to fix.

What metrics should you watch for website statistics?

Some of the elementary things you want to watch website statistics are:

Conversion rates:

What % of visitors to a sales page made purchases? There is enough of facts and information accessible on how to optimize sales pages for excellent conversion rates. Once you have a base measurement of your current conversion rate, start making little changes to your copy, headlines, and other page elements then see for a change in the conversion rate to see if changes helped.

Page views per visit:

How many pages does each visitor look at? If this number is very low – one or two – then visitors aren’t being engaged enough or discover what they were looking for.

Monthly unique visitors:

Is the number growing over time? Your traffic should be going up! If it’s not, time to review your promotional tactics and strategies to see where you can focus on improving.

What can you do with all that information?

Website statistics offer you a wealth of information — use it to your advantage!

Here are some easy ways to use your website statistics to build your business:

- Contact sites that refer visitors/link to your site and send them a thank you note.

- By giving priority notice Offer sites who have published your articles for future articles you release for reprint. Take permission; and then email your articles straight to the influenced sites so your articles are easier for them to publish.

- See the best popular pages of your website then focus on building and developing those pages with improved copywriting, promote affiliate products, etc.

- Look for trends in the type of websites that are referring visitors to your site and use it to better target your marketing efforts.

As there are different ways to examine your website statistics, and numerous ways to interpret them. If you pay enough attention to trends and difficulties, and less regard to actual numbers, you’ll be ahead of the game in website statistics!